Political Wisdom: The Power of 41 Votes

By

Susan Davis

Apr 27, 2010 7:17 am ET

Why are Republicans stalling financial regulatory reform legislation?

There’s five reasons, writes Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic, including Democrats’ current unpopularity and the GOP’s “substantive objections to parts of the bill based on political philosophy and their understanding of the economy.” However, Ambinder writes, the Capitol Hill bickering is more political jockeying as senators in both parties expect the bill to—eventually—pass.

“Voting to delay debate on a popular bill is not the same thing as opposing it. In the end, even Richard Shelby expects a good number of Republican senators to come aboard. By twenty points, Americans trust Obama to fix this situation more than they do Republicans. That will matter in the end. And this IS a big bill that WILL change a lot of things.”

Perhaps the problem for Republicans is not that they oppose the Democrats’ bill, but that they haven’t proposed even tougher legislation, writes Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard.

“The great mystery to me is why Republicans are passing up the chance to argue that this bill doesn’t go far enough. Why not embrace the Brown-Kaufman amendment to break up the banks, in order to show that the GOP stands against all massive agglomerations of power, whether in Washington or on Wall Street? The Republicans could raise Cain about the ratings agencies, who gave good scores to bad mortgages but whose oligopoly is not addressed in the Dodd bill. And they might ask why the Democrats want to end Too Big to Fail for the banks, but not for Fannie, Freddie, and GM.”

While much has been made about the importance of the legislative process in writing sweeping legislation, Matthew Yglesias writes for The Daily Beast that Democrats are hoping that a swifter process—in contrast to the lengthy health care debate—will result in a better bill.

“It’s a politically smart strategy, and in many ways it’s a good strategy, but it carries with it some substantial costs. It means we’re looking at a bill that punts on many of the biggest issues. It means that neither the broad public nor the narrower circle of policy elites and experts and semi-experts have a firm grasp of the relevant questions. And this in turn means that we’ve got a bill whose main premise is that we need to trust the same institutions and many of the same people who were arguably responsible for the crisis in the first place. Progressives are basically left to hope that Tim Geithner knows what he’s doing. That’s a big contrast with the health-care battle—in which the basic idea was much bigger than any one politician. The case for speed, however, is fairly strong and comes in three parts.”